Next on tap: a little help

Fundraiser set for Wolff's Biergarten GM, who had brain tumor

Updated 8:05 am, Monday, November 4, 2013

Times Union file photo
Mark Graydon, center, at Wolff's Biergarten in Albany during a World Cup soccer match in 2010.

Times Union file photo
Mark Graydon, center, at Wolff's Biergarten in Albany during a World Cup soccer match in 2010.

Photo: MICHAEL P. FARRELL

Next on tap: a little help

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Albany

When the neurologist told Mark Graydon he had a tumor the size of a small chicken egg growing near the parts of his brain that control motor function for his right side and speech, he reacted in a way that many might find peculiar but is quintessentially Graydon.

He said, "I'm a bartender! I need to be able to pour beer and talk!"

The response, seemingly glib, in fact revealed deep terror of losing the life he's built in the adopted city he's come to love. What is a bartender who can't talk? What is a musician who can't do "Mustang Sally" as a guest singer for a blues band at his bar — or a new dad who can't entertain his twin toddlers with a ditty he and they learned from Barney the purple dinosaur?

The doctor warned, we need to do surgery immediately — as in tomorrow — and there's a possibility you won't be able to talk for a while afterward. Further, he told Graydon, there's a chance you could have permanently altered speech and motor functions.

Graydon thought, I don't want to live if that's how it will be.

It was less than a week and a half ago — the morning of Oct. 24. Graydon, 34, who is the general manager of Wolff's Biergarten and a co-owner of The Olde English Pub & Pantry, both in Albany, delayed calling his wife, Greta, for a bit while he composed himself. Thoughts and emotions surged through the once incomprehensible news that became ever more real as he lay in the roaring buzz and clank of the MRI machine. He sat there, dreading the call to Greta.

Note: Proceeds will be given to the Graydon family to pay for medical expenses not covered by insurance and lost wages and tips for the month or so that Graydon is unable to work.

He says, "That what was scaring the (hell) out of me: Maybe that I couldn't be there for my kids and my wife the way I had been, maybe that I wouldn't even be there are all."

His appointment was at 8:30 a.m., and he'd told her he'd be home by 10. It was nearing 11.

His cellphone flashed with text messages from Greta as she sought updates on the results of the MRI. She was at home with their boys, Charlie and Leo. The 14-month-old blond twins are the beloved product of two years of agonizing in-vitro fertilization efforts. How could he be a dad if he couldn't talk? What if it was worse? What if —? Enough!

"I really lost it for a bit," Graydon says. "Then I got it together. You don't realize your own capacity to handle things. I could be watching a cat commercial and be in tears, but I hear this, and I can get it sorted out." Handling things, he knew, was a way to have the tiniest effect on a situation that was otherwise so far beyond his control.

He called Greta. He called his parents in his native England and told them to get on a plane. At home, he recorded audio and video messages on his phone for his wife and parents. On a video for the twins, he told them how much he loved them, laughed and sang songs, including Barney's "Mr. Knickerbocker."

Graydon checked into St. Peter's Hospital in Albany on the afternoon of Oct. 24, and the next day underwent a 3 1/2-hour brain surgery to remove the tumor.

He came home five days later to their house in Pine Hills, a 12-plus-inch semicircular scar curving from just behind the middle of his forehead to in front of his left ear. Lashed by three dozen stainless-steel staples, the raised welt looks like a long, red-purple worm. The boys seem to have barely noticed it. Graydon was already thinking of sartorial solutions before the surgery. A tweet he sent out prior to being admitted to the hospital said, in part, "it'll leave me with an awesome scar 2 show ... #MustBuyANewHat."

"It all happened so fast," Graydon says. Diagnosis to surgery: about 24 hours.

Doctors told him the tumor could have been growing for nine to 18 months. There had been a sign, a symptom that recurred maybe five times, starting a few months after the boys were born, in August 2012. He'd have a moment — a spell? a brain fart? — when he simply couldn't find the right words. It usually happened on busy Saturday mornings at Wolff's, when Graydon works solo behind the bar and tends to dozens of soccer-mad fans as they watch international matches. He maintains multiple conversations up and down the long bar, commenting on games shown on six big-screen TVs, joking with customers, filling liter after liter of beer. The lapses, coming months apart, were easy to disguise by turning to arrange glasses behind the bar or glancing up at a TV, and after perhaps 20 seconds his words would return. He never told anyone. He assumed it was from exhaustion. The IVF had been emotionally grueling, followed by Greta's pregnancy and new-parenthood of the twins, compounded by additional responsibilities at Wolff's and the stress of launching The Olde English.

"I thought it was just because I was tired all the time," Graydon says. The boys didn't sleep through the night until they were almost a year old, and since Greta was with them all day, Graydon felt he had to get up with the boys at least as often as she did every night.

And then one of the episodes happened in front of Greta. They were video-chatting a few weeks ago with his parents in England when he suddenly couldn't speak. Trying to remember the name of a song, he said, "I don't — I don't" about 14 times.

"You're going to the doctor," she said.

"You're going to the neurologist," his doctor said.

"You're going to get brain scan and an MRI," the neurologist said, after which he said, "You're going to the neurosurgeon."

The neurosurgeon said, "You're going into surgery tomorrow morning."

"It was devastating to hear," says Graydon's father, John, tearing up as he remembers that first phone call. He and his wife, Carol, earlier this year faced brain cancer with another family member: Their daughter, Mark's sister, who lives next door to them, southeast of London, lost her mother-in-law to brain cancer in February; to hear the words "brain tumor" from their son, more than 3,000 miles away, was overwhelming. They were on a plane the next morning. Matt Baumgartner, the principal owner of Wolff's and a partner with Graydon in The Olde English, picked them up at Kennedy airport and brought them north, arriving at the hospital only hours after their son got out of surgery.

"There's still so much more we don't know," John Graydon says. "But so far ..."

They're awaiting test results from multiple cancer centers, where parts of the tumor were sent for examination.

"I'm very optimistic for him," says Edward Scheid, the neurosurgeon who operated on Graydon, and who, coincidentally, is a customer Graydon knows from Wolff's. The tumor is a glioma, which developed from the cells that surround neurons, and appears to be low-grade — much closer to the benign end of the cancer spectrum than the malignant, Scheid says. Depending on test results, radiation therapy and/or chemotherapy may not be needed — or may.

"I can't think about that now," Graydon says, sitting on the couch at home, with his rescue dog, Honey, drowsing next to him. "We'll deal with that then, if we have to." He feels fine; the most pain he experienced was having the metal staples on his scalp removed and replaced. Speaking presents no problem; indeed, he talks at even greater length than before the surgery, because he's hyped up on steroids that combat swelling in his brain. At times, though, he mistakenly transposes similar-sounding words, for example saying "cardio" instead of "chemo," as his traumatized brain recovers from invasive surgery.

He marvels at the support he's received from friends, others in the restaurant business and, especially, his customers at Wolff's, who have organized a fundraiser for him at the beer garden on Nov. 16. (He doesn't expect to return to work until December.) Most swarmed social media with well-wishes. Others followed Graydon's lead after he tweeted, pre-surgery, "Bloody hell everyone, calm down!! It's only a brain tumor" and "What I wouldn't give for a cigarette and two beers. 1 is never enough." One friend retorted, "I heard they found an egg-sized brain next to a really big tumor."

"The customers I have ... at Wolff's are so important to me. ... I truly love so many people there," he says. "(They're) some of the best relationships I have."

Graydon never planned on being a bartender — or even coming to the United States. After a college education in theater and a stint performing in touring musicals and with a Blues Brothers tribute band, he met Greta while both were vacationing in Greece in 2005. They fell in love, and some months later he went New Orleans, where she was to start graduate school. He arrived two weeks before Hurricane Katrina, and they spent days as refugees in the Superdome before being evacuated to Houston. After three years in New York City, with Graydon working in human resources, the couple came home to Greta's native Albany, where her parents live, and Graydon replied to a help-wanted ad seeking a soccer-savvy bartender at a new beer garden opening in the city's warehouse district.

Customers at Wolff's were won over by Graydon's accent, soccer knowledge, bright conviviality and cheery loquacity. He can talk about just about anything to just about anyone. The prospect of that skill being impaired terrified him when he was first diagnosed.

He jokes, "I'm not the most intelligent person in the world, but I can talk I good game. I can't lose that."

Greta says, "If I had a brain tumor, my first concern wouldn't be whether I'd be able to speak afterward or to sing or play the piano, but that's what matters to him — it's his life. That's what I spent the whole time during surgery thinking about: What if he wakes up and I have to explain to him that he can't move or he can't talk?" Doctors told Graydon they didn't expect him to speak coherently for a couple of days after the surgery, or at least that he'd have difficulty finding the right words.

But nurses in the postoperative unit tell him he was speaking in complete, intelligible sentences within an hour of leaving the OR. They didn't know what he was talking about, because they didn't know what he does for a living, but Greta did.

Though he'd just had an egg-sized tumor removed from his brain and was so loopy from the anesthesia that he doesn't remember doing so, Mark Graydon was talking about ordering kegs of beer for Wolff's.